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What are the best practices when you acquire a website with high SEO value?

My company is considering to buy a company with very high seo value (PR7, lots of incoming links from universities etc...). The site is currently getting ~500K visits/m which are mostly driven by high seo value.

Let's say we are buying www.company-a.com and our website is www.company-b.com

We will buy company-a.com and 301 redirect it to www.company-b.com/company-a or company-a.company-b.com

In this case

1. What percentage of the SEO value will be transferred to our website? Do we lose anything?

1 Response

This is only a partial answer based on my experience. It also assumes site A is at least related to site B.

301 redirects don't transfer 100% of SEO value on to the resulting pages so the less you use them the better.

I made the mistake of renaming a powerful page a number of years ago and it has fractured the back links since. The new page is still powerful but we are slowly losing ground over the previous strength.

I recommend making a list of all URLs with good trust and back links and keeping them. In fact, try and pool all the back links you can to important topical pages.

You can massage the design/content and include links to your other site (on the same topic please) to give your site a boost.

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